Brazil and the USA: Similarities in Urban Development

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  Introduction My dissertation focused on the Brazilian production and reception of representations of the United States as a growing model of modern society in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Based on the analysis of parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, diplomatic correspondence, books, students' journals, and textual and pictorial advertisements in newspapers, among other historical documents, my findings indicate that the United States emerged as a new axis of reflection on the meaning of modernity for Brazilians well before the historical break traditionally chosen by historians as a landmark in the development of the United States as a modern world. By doing so, a gap in historiography has been identified: there has been no comprehensive examination of the United States' influence in Brazil previous to that historical watershed, as well as prior to Brazil's first republican regime's open relationship with the US government. My findings also challen
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The Cultural Ties That Bind Brazil and the USA

 

The diagnosis: Brazilian perceptions of Brazil seen via the mirror of the United States

During the 1870s, there was a dispute in high political circles over how to attract a steady flow of foreign workers to meet labor demands in Central-South Brazil's quickly developing coffee districts. This discussion arose in the backdrop of growing emancipationist pressure from both abroad and at home, a movement that took tangible form in September 1871 with the passage of the Law of the Free Birth.414 Two years after the law was approved, the Minister of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, José Fernandes da Costa Pereira Junior, commissioned João Cardoso de Menezes e Souza, a deputy from the Northern province of Goiás, to devise a plan to attract foreigners to the Brazilian lands to fulfill the dynamic coffee sector's insatiable demand for workers. The assumption was that a constant flow of foreign workers would help to develop the still latent public and private factors of agricultural growth and riches. However, achieving this single goal necessitated, first and foremost, the restructuring of the agricultural sector.

In his account, as well as in other diagnoses of U.S. society made by Brazilian intellectuals both before and after Menezes e Souza, the concern that both statesmen and ordinary people showed for the development of education and scientific curricula in the United States appeared as a main feature of the material wealth and growth of that expanding society. Manoel de Oliveira Lima, a Brazilian intellectual and member of the Brazilian diplomatic legation in Washington, explained that Menezes e Souza's comment on Anglo-Saxon and Latin 'races' was a local intellectual offshoot of pseudo-scientific racial theories and diagnoses of social evolution elaborated in Western Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, this foreign ideological tendency was also gaining traction among Brazilian intellectuals.423 We recall that, according to the racial paradigm developed by the fashionable evolutionist theory, the 'civilised' peoples of the time were designated as white and Protestant people of German and British heritage who were successful in constructing a new civilization in the United States. The strength of this new social configuration was heavily reliant on the purported materialization of modern freedoms, such as freedom of education, religious and political freedom, or freedom of speech, as demonstrated in the previous chapter; however, its strength was also reliant on industrial development based on popular education and scientific research, as demonstrated in this thesis and elsewhere. The way this ideology appears in Menezes e Souza's work, as well as in some of our other sources, fits well with this description because of his conviction in the alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxon 'race' over the Latin peoples.

Argentina, the most successful case of immigration policies among the nations of the Río de la Plata system thus far, provided the major templates for such a project. 


However, the United States dominated. Menezes e Souza focused on the latter country's immigration policies and practices. The author claimed to have investigated how to divert a portion of European immigration towards America, where the Anglo-Saxon race lived. His goal was to bring the civilizing exodus to the land of Pedro Álvares Cabral.416 Menezes e Souza's study also contains a comparative analysis of how the goal of enticing the European 'civilising exodus' was addressed concurrently in Brazil, the Platine Republics, and the United States. The inquiry resulted in a volume titled Theses sobre Colonização do Brazil. Projeto de Solução de Questões Sociais Relating to This Difficult Problem. Relatório Apresentado ao Ministério do Agricultura, Commércio e Obras Publicas em 1875 (Thesis on the Colonization of Brazil). Report submitted to the Minister of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works in 1875, "Project to Solve the Social Questions Connected with this Difficult Problem," was published in Rio de Janeiro the same year.417 This work was notable at the time because it was the first articulate treatise written locally on the hot topic of immigration and potential farm workers in light of the manpower issue caused by liberation. For the sake of our research, Menezes e Souza's study is particularly noteworthy because it recognizes the relevant place.

Brazilians provided the United States with examples, specifically on the development of agricultural productive forces.


In his introductory considerations, titled 'Emigration to the United States, Brazil, and the Plate Republics', Menezes e Souza took a broader view of the international political scene and noted its shifting conditions.418 He stated that 'the Latin race is under threat of losing pre-eminence' at the hands of the 'Anglo-Saxons' and that France, the old civilising reference for all the nations of the 'Latin group','seemed to have lost the opportunity to primogeniture and tutelage which it used to exert upon the Latin family without contradiction'.Menezes e Souza referred to the 'Anglo-Saxon' stock to the British colonists who went to the 'Northern portion of the new hemisphere' in search of a new home; 'having traversed the ocean, they left behind in […] old Europe the traditions, prejudices and habits […] which […] would have curbed their movements and retarded their progressive advance' (419).420 According to Menezes e Souza's description, the descendants of the 'European race' developed a 'vigorous society' in the United States, full of 'vitality' and 'the influence of which grows at a speed never seen before'.421 

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